How the Cookie Diet Crumbles

That pitch may conjure up visions of unlimited sugar cookies with sprinkles and gingerbread men.

But the "cookie diets" being heavily promoted on TV, in magazines and on the Internet these days don't give you those options. Instead, you eat prepackaged cookies (infused with things like glycerine and protein powder) throughout the day in place of breakfast and lunch, then eat a "sensible dinner" of lean protein and vegetables for 800 to 1,200 calories per day, which the purveyors promise will make you lose weight.

Each of the top three diet-cookie brands—Dr. Siegal's Cookie Diet, Smart for Life and Hollywood Cookie Diet—encourages you to space the cookies throughout the day. Each claims to have a proprietary blend of protein that helps control hunger so you can stick to the low-calorie plan.

Diets centered on a single food go back for decades. (Remember the Grapefruit Diet, the Drinking Man's Diet and the Ice Cream Diet?) So does the idea of removing choice and temptation by eating a preplanned meal substitute. (Think Optifast or Slimfast.) And cookie diets themselves are not new— Sanford Siegal, a physician, started using his diet cookies with patients in his South Florida weight-loss clinics in 1975.

But marketing campaigns, reports of celebrity users and heated rivalries among the brands have helped make them visible of late. And, of course, the American public remains hungry for anything that promises to take weight off, easily and quickly, without giving up any beloved foods.

So do they work?

Even strict nutritionists agree that if you take in fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight. But they have a long list of concerns with cookie diets. Some say that consuming fewer than about 1,000 calories a day can throw your body into a state of "conservation," which slows your metabolism down and makes weight loss slower. "Your body thinks something is wrong and doesn't realize you're doing this voluntarily," says Bonnie Taub-Dix, a private weight-loss consultant in New York and spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association.

Dinner and late-night snacking are the biggest issues for most dieters, says Ms. Taub-Dix. If you can limit yourself to a dinner of lean fish and vegetables, as these diets require, you won't need to substitute cookies for other meals.

Some experts also worry that consuming mostly cookies for long periods of time makes for very unbalanced nutrition. "How are you going to fit in your servings of fruits and vegetables?" asks Elisabetta Politi, nutrition director of the Duke Diet and Fitness Center in Durham, N.C., which serves large salads or vegetable-based soup at meals. "There is so much evidence that the Mediterranean diet—with fruit, vegetables, whole grains, protein and unprocessed foods—is a healthy way to lose weight. These diets seem to be the complete antithesis of that," she says.

How the Diet Cookies Tasted

We asked a panel of 10 Wall Street Journal staffers to taste-test some of the offerings of three major cookie-diet companies and rate them on a scale from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest). Here are the results—and the companies' responses:

Hollywood Cookie Diet

Rating: Chocolate Chip 5.3

Comments: "Looks like a real cookie" with a "biscuit-type consistency" and "chocolaty chips (too few)" and an "odd aftertaste."

Rating: Oatmeal Raisin 5.1

Comments: "Most oatmeal-tasting," "soft, chewy, spicy and delicious," but with a "strong ginger flavor" that "tastes like medicine."

Company Response: "Virtually everyone who tries the Hollywood Cookie Diet loves the taste and cannot believe that it is a diet cookie," says Larry Turner, co-creator.

Dr. Siegal's Cookie Diet

Rating: Oatmeal Raisin 3.1

Comments: "Tastes almost like a cookie" with "citrusy undertones" but with a "fake and spongelike texture" that made it "tough to eat."

Rating: Chocolate 2.9

Comments: "What chocolate?" "Tastes more like a date" or "cardboard," "rubbery," though "I feel good about eating them."

Company response: "I'm Dr. Siegal, not Mrs. Fields.... To submit to a taste test a product that is designed not to entertain people but to help them overcome a serious health condition is to perpetuate the very culture that has made so many of us unhealthy," says founder Sanford Siegal.

Smart for Life

Rating: Oatmeal Raisin 2.4

Comments: "Hints of apple cinnamon" but a "weird consistency" and a "terrible aftertaste"; "tastes like a cookie that was baked incorrectly."

Company response: "Our cookie is a meal, not really a cookie. What we find is that people end up liking them very much. We minimally process and bake them to keep the nutrients in," says Sasson Moulavi, medical director.

She also notes that while protein is known to curb hunger, the five grams of protein per cookie the major brands offer isn't very much. "When people eat low-carb diets, they eat 20 to 50 grams of protein per meal," she says.

Indeed, says Ms. Taub-Dix, "for the same amount of fiber, protein, fat and carbs, and fewer calories, you could have a slice of low-carb bread with low-fat cheese. You could have it with your kids and not feel like an outcast."

The experts also say that cookie diets don't help teach people better eating habits in the long run. "A lot of patients tell me, 'Just tell me what to do and I'll do it.' But that usually puts the kibosh on success. They can't wait for the day when they can stop doing it," says Ms. Taub-Dix, whose program involves helping clients understand why they are eating too much and helping them change their behavior.

The cookie-diet companies have answers for each of those concerns.

Dr. Siegal says he hears the argument that his regime has too few calories "all the time—and I have to laugh.... I've seen a half-million patients over the last 50 years, and I have yet to see a single problem associated with a low-calorie diet. It simply doesn't exist." That said, concern about creating too much of a calorie deficit is why he tells clients not to exercise until they get into the maintenance phase of the diet, when they have lost their weight and are trying not to regain it.

"We don't want to go into that range where the body starts to protect itself," he says. "You don't accomplish anything more by doing that." (Dieters get six of the 90-calorie cookies per day; weekly packages cost $56.)

Smart for Life, which used to be in business with Dr. Siegal but parted ways in 2006, boasts that its cookies are made with "60% organic" ingredients, "triple-filtered water" and a proprietary "Fortefiber." "Our cookie is a full combination of food ... that you don't get with other cookies," says Sasson Moulavi, a physician and medical director of Smart for Life Weight Management Centers, which also operates 42 weight-loss clinics. (Users can have up to eight of the 105-calorie cookies per day, depending on their height; a two-week supply costs $139.)

Bitterness between the two companies remains—www.cookiediet.com is Dr. Siegal's Web site; www.thecookiediet.com takes you to Smart for Life.

Larry Turner, president of Sunset Health Products Inc., which makes the Hollywood Cookie Diet, says his company came up with a cookie concept in 2006. He says Hollywood—which first made 48-hour juice cleansers—focused on making its cookies flavorful as well as filling. (Our blind taste test found that Hollywood's are the best-tasting) At 150 calories each, Hollywood's cookies are also more substantial, but users get only four per day. (A package of 12 costs $20.)

All three companies tell dieters to get their vitamins elsewhere. Smart for Life says dinner should consist of 10 to 12 ounces of lean protein with up to five servings of nonstarchy vegetables. Dr. Siegal's cookies come with a bottle of multivitamins. Hollywood recently reformulated its cookies to remove many of the added vitamins. "Vitamins taste nasty. You have to put in other things that mask the taste," says Mr. Turner, who adds that most customers already use multivitamin pills. "Vitamins also affect the shelf life, and we had production issues with it."

I asked each of the companies if they had conducted clinical studies to back up their claims, or had kept track of how many customers had lost weight and kept it off.

"What is there to study? You eat a low-calorie diet and you lose weight. Nobody disputes that," says Dr. Siegal. He estimates that over 50% of the half-million people he's seen in his practice had reached their goal weight. But he says he has not followed up with them long-term. "If they have lost their weight, they have no reason to come back to us," he says.

ENLARGE

Joe Fornabaio for The Wall Street Journal

Matthew Siegal, president and CEO of Dr. Siegal's Direct Nutritionals LLC and the founder's son, says, "There has never been a diet that will keep the weight off if you go back to your old habits."

There's also no way to keep track of those who buy retail cookies. Mr. Siegal says that fewer than 20% of the 110,000 or so customers who have ordered from the company's Web site do so only once, though he does not know what percent have ordered three or more times.

Smart for Life sent research showing that Fortefiber "helps maintain healthy blood cholesterol, glucose and insulin levels in healthy individuals" and helps reduce insulin resistance in hamsters. It also sent several papers in support of its triple-filtered water. As for studies with weight-loss patients, "I have really been wanting to do a study—we just haven't had a chance," says Dr. Moulavi. "We have exploded in growth over the last three years."

Hollywood Diet sent a study, unpublished and paid for by the company, showing that each of 22 patients lost weight (between three and 11 pounds) over two weeks. No one reported an upset stomach, and each "expressed their desire to use the diet again on a regular basis."

Each company also provided the names of customers who have lost weight on their plans and believe in them.

Terry and Bill Sauer of Sicklerville, N.J., say they have lost 45 and 94 pounds, respectively, on Dr. Siegal's Cookie Diet since last February. "I drive a truck, and it's very easy to eat one of those six cookies whenever you get a little hungry. That's why I could stick to it," says Mr. Sauer, 60 years old.

Tony Lazos, 67, a business executive in Oceanside, Calif., says the Hollywood Cookie Diet helped him lose the 27 pounds he had gained due to stress and a slowing metabolism. "I could be a cheerleader for this diet, because it works," he says.

Brooke Webb Masten, 30, of Jupiter, Fla., says she lost more than 100 pounds on Smart for Life and has kept the weight off for three years. She has since become a fitness trainer and is studying nutrition, and even though she has heard all the criticism, she says she would recommend the cookie diet to people who had struggled with other plans. "Eating a salad for lunch with small, nutritious snacks is ideal, but a lot of people aren't able to do that," she says.

In the end, everybody is different—and if you've had trouble losing weight on other programs, one of the cookie diets might be worth a try. But don't expect miracles or sugar plums.

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